About Me

Saturday, March 31, 2012

I ran us the next film in
sequence from the 28-movie Abbott and Costello at Universal boxed set: Pardon
My Sarong, an attempt by Universal
and a production company called Mayfair (there were actually several companies
called Mayfair, including one that had existed briefly in the early 1930’s, but
in 1942 this was probably a profit-sharing vehicle or a tax dodge — at a time
when the top U.S. income tax bracket was a whopping 91 percent, many stars
formed “production companies” in partnership with the studios that had them
under contract so the money they were paid for their films would be considered
capital gains and thereby taxed at only 25 percent) to duplicate the success of
the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby “Road” movies with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. It
didn’t really evoke the spirit of the “Road” movies (Abbott and Costello were
brilliant comedians, equally adept at slapstick and dialogue humor, but they
lacked the insouciance of Hope and Crosby, jointly or severally, and between
them Crosby and Hope had two good singing voices to Abbott and Costello’s none)
but it’s a quite funny movie anyway even though it has so many crashing genre shifts that, with Arthur Lubin out of the picture
as an Abbott and Costello director, maybe Universal should have hired Preston
Sturges instead of the actual director, Erle C. Kenton. Kenton was an
all-arounder who proved equally adept at comedy and horror (he’d directed
Charles Laughton and Bela Lugosi in The Island of Lost Souls, the first and best version of The Island of Dr.
Moreau, at Paramount in 1933, and
at Universal he did three of the films in the Frankenstein cycle — Ghost of
Frankenstein, House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula — and here he got to work with one of his frequent horror collaborators,
actor Lionel Atwill).

Written by the people who’d worked on the immediately
previous Abbott and Costello films — True Boardman, Nat Perrin and John Grant —
Pardon My Sarong opens in the office of the
Chicago Transit Authority, where they’re wondering why an inner-city bus whose
total route is only a 10-block loop has suddenly got lost and they have no idea
where it is. Then we see the bus passing a highway sign which reads, “Los
Angeles — 144 miles,” and then we see the drivers, Algernon Shaw (Bud Abbott) and Wellington Pflug
(Lou Costello). They were somehow induced by multimillionaire playboy Tommy
Layton (Robert Paige) to drive him and a bevy of girls he’s been dating to
L.A., where his yacht is moored and where he’s planning to enter it in a
sailing race across the Pacific (in the middle of wartime? That took guts!) — only he arouses the ire of
yachtswoman Joan Marshall (Virginia Bruce, playing yet another role for which she was overqualified — aside from
her marvelous performance as Jane Eyre in the 1934 version for Monogram,
virtually none of her films show her true talent) when he hires away her
brother’s crew, and she gets them to return to her brother’s boat and leaves
Layton stuck with herself, Abbott and Costello (who’ve been waylaid by a
Chicago cop, played marvelously by William Demarest, who was there to arrest
them and get the bus back, only thanks to his machinations the bus ends up at
the bottom of Los Angeles harbor and A&C end up rescued by Layton when they
cling to his anchor as he takes it up) and a couple of people who flee in a
hurry once they realize they’re in for an ocean voyage if they remain.

What’s
more, Joan deliberately sabotages Layton’s compass and he doesn’t know they’re
off course until he looks up at the night sky and wonders why Polaris isn’t
where he thought it should be. “I told you to follow that star!” he thunders at
Abbott and Costello — and Costello whines back, “You didn’t tell me what to do
once we caught up with it!” Needless to say, just as they’re about to starve —
they’ve had their last meal of crackers and two beans apiece — they reach land,
an uncharted island with a bunch of comely natives trained to dance by the
great African-American dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham. They’re
supposed to represent a native tribe with a huge treasure in gems on the
island, and Costello ends up proclaimed as their great spirit “Moola” and given
the right to marry the chief’s daughter — only she’s got a boyfriend, Whaba
(Leif Erickson — whose presence puts the rest of the cast one degree of
separation from James Dean: Dean and Erickson acted together in Dean’s very
first filmed appearance, the weird Roman Catholic TV-movie Hill No. 1, a story about the days right after Jesus’
crucifixion in which Erickson played Pontius Pilate and Dean the Apostle John),
who appears to be the only indigenous male in the place and who’s naturally
unhappy about losing his hot girl to an outsider, and a chunkily unattractive
outsider at that.

Pardon My Sarong was the last Abbott and Costello film for which Universal felt they
needed the audience boost of big musical numbers; the Ink Spots (with their
original leader, tenor Bill Kenny) appear in a Los Angeles nightclub (a
spectacular set with a mirrored ceiling, which must have been tough for cinematographer Milton Krasner
to light) and do two of their hits, “Do I Worry?” and “Shout, Brother, Shout”
(the latter also danced to by a spectacular Black tap trio called Tip, Tap and
Toe) — imdb.com also lists them as doing their mega-hit “Java Jive,” but they
don’t — and when they get to the island native girl Nan Wynn gets to sing a
ballad called “Lovely Luana” and then the troupe does an exotic number called
“Vingo Jingo” by Don Raye and Gene De Paul, a piece of faux exotica similar to “Tropicana” from the Olsen and
Johnson movie Crazy House. Then the tone of the movie changes again as Lionel Atwill makes his appearance and is
revealed (not surprisingly) to be a bad guy, though his sinister plot (which
includes rigging an extinct volcano with fireworks to create the illusion that
it is erupting again!) is merely to steal all the native people’s jewels — it’s
not, as I had suspected it would be, something to use the island’s South
Pacific location to help the Axis in their war effort. Atwill and the baddies
get their comeuppance and the film ends with a spectacular chase scene in which
Costello is being towed on a board behind a boat, only a swordfish slices the
board in half and instead of one board Costello is maneuvering uncertainly on two
D.I.Y. water skis. Eventually it all ends happily, with the hate-at-first-sight
couple of Tommy and Joan in love and paired off, though somewhat surprisingly
it does not end with A&C
recovering the native treasure and living on it in grand style back home (maybe
the writers and producer Alex Gottlieb felt they’d already done that one in Hold
That Ghost).

I first saw a lot of the
Abbott and Costello movies shrunk to an hour-long time slot on a local TV
station in the San Francisco Bay Area during my teen years — and apparently
others saw them under similar conditions because the user review that came up
when I looked up this film on imdb.com was from someone who until the VHS tape
of this film came out had never seen the opening and had only the dimmest idea
who William Demarest was playing or why he was so important (as with Shemp
Howard in some of their earlier films, Abbott and Costello played quite well
with Demarest — having another comedian around seemed to bring out the best in
them), and the last time I saw Pardon My Sarong was in the 1970’s, so I didn’t remember that much
of it but it struck me this time around as quite a funny film: Abbott and
Costello might not have had the genius for characterization of Laurel and Hardy
or the interest in satire of the Marx Brothers, but they were still brilliantly
funny, and they certainly knew whom to steal from (there’s a sequence in which
both Abbott and Costello disguise themselves as Marco the Magician, and the
presence of all three Marcos can’t help but evoke at least a few memories of
the Marx Brothers’ mirror scene in Duck Soup) and how to get laughs from sometimes pretty thin
material.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

The film was The Wild Women of Wongo, a really peculiar 1958 indie from Florida (the
production is credited to Jaywall Productions and Wolcott Productions,
companies obviously named for the film’s director, James L. Wolcott) that was
profiled in the last Harry and Michael Medved book on bad movies (before
Michael turned into a supposedly “serious” Right-wing commentator lamenting the
coarsening of the culture by “liberal” Hollywood) based on a script by Cedric
Rutherford that achieves a sort of demented silliness. The film opens with a
voice-over narration by a woman representing herself as Mother Nature, over
some stock shots of the natural beauties of Florida, explaining that 10,000
years ago she made a mistake: she created adjacent countries called Wongo and
Goona, and in Wongo she made all the women beautiful and the men homely, while
in Goona she made all the men beautiful and the women homely. The story
basically deals with how the Wongo women discovered and ultimately won the
Goona men, all of this under the threat of the “Great Dragon” (actually a
crocodile to which the Wongo women periodically sacrifice one of their number
as part of their religion) as well as a group of ape-men who supposedly are
going to invade from a fleet of canoes and conquer both Wongo and Goona. The
Wild Women of Wongo isn’t as bad a movie as
its reputation: Harry Walsh’s cinematography is genuinely beautiful (and
actually benefits from the film being in Pathécolor — the fact that there are
literally no interiors and therefore all of it is shot in natural light, save for an underwater sequence with
one of the Wongo women successfully wrestling and killing the Great Dragon,
helps a great deal) and Wolcott’s direction (assuming it is indeed his and not
the illustrious guest he hosted on the set — more on that later) is competent and serviceable. The weaknesses
of this movie are the silliness of the concept and the way it got expressed in
Rutherford’s writing and the highly stilted delivery of the actors — yes, this
is one of those movies in which (in Dwight MacDonald’s words) the term “actor”
can only be used for courtesy, but it’s not clear how much of the
first-day-of-drama-school monotone we hear from virtually everyone in this
movie (the line readings are so bad a parrot upstages all the human actors!) is
the fault of the on-screen performers and how much is because Rutherford and/or
Wolcott wanted it that way.

The
plot is an assemblage of clichés that Rutherford doesn’t even bother to
resolve; the outside threat from the ape-men, which provides the initial
motivator for the plot (in hopes of building an alliance between Goona and
Wongo to repel it, one of the Goonish men travels in a boat to Wongo — only
once the Wongan women get a look at him, they want him rather than their own homelier men, and the jealous
Wongan men react by condemning him to death — a fate he barely escapes, racing
down the beach to his canoe and frantically rowing his way out of there),
simply disappears in mid-movie. So does the ritual that the Goonish men have to
go into the jungle for “one moon” (meaning one month) without weapons and not
have any interactions with women, and when they come back they get a Goonish
woman as a bride (and there’s a quite cruel group shot of the Goonish women to
indicate what a dubious prize that
is) — only the Wongan women just happen along to the Goonish men’s encampment and spoil the whole thing.
Eventually, of course, the Goonish men pair off with the Wongan women, the
Wongan men pair off with the Goonish women (we’re supposed to believe they find
each other appealing!), the ape-men just disappear from the plot altogether and
the film grinds to a close — and given that this movie was probably aimed at
the grind-houses and the drive-ins the term “grinds to a close” for once seems
appropriate. It also doesn’t help that the carefully worked out schema of the
story seems to have eluded either the talents or the capabilities of the
casting director: though we’re told that the Goonish men are hot and the Wongan
men are hopelessly ugly, the Wongan males are distinguishable from their
Goonish counterparts only by being a bit heavier-set and given horrible
blue-grey hair dye (indeed, my own tastes run so much towards the “bear” type
some of the men playing Wongan males did more for me than the Goonish ones
did!), while the high priestess of Wonga is a rather homely-faced woman, though
with a good enough bod that she acquits herself reasonably well in the dance
the movie’s plot stops right in the middle long enough for us to see. And the ape-men,
to the extent we see them at all, aren’t the ugly, swarthy creatures we were
expecting but aren’t bad looking themselves.

The most famous aspect of The
Wild Women of Wongo had to do with the
presence of one of America’s most illustrious playwrights, Tennessee Williams,
on the set; indeed, there was one rumor (repeated as fact by a trivia
commentator on imdb.com) that Williams actually directed much of the movie as a
favor to Wolcott and for the novelty value of doing something he’d never done
before. Not true, said Harry and Michael Medved: according to their account,
members of the University of Miami football team were pressed into service to
play some of the male characters, and Williams was having an affair with one of
these men, so he’d show up on the set of The Wild Women of Wongo and wait for his boyfriend de jour to finish filming so the two of them could go out
and have fun. Indeed, according to the Medveds, Williams was so bored by the
proceedings on the Wild Women of Wongo set that he kept falling asleep, and director Wolcott worried that his
snoring would get on the soundtrack and ruin the film! Not that that would have mattered much; though there are far worse
movies than Wild Women of Wongo
(like Shriek of the Mutilated, The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman, The
Creeping Terror and Manos: The
Hands of Fate), and one can at least
appreciate the beauty of Harry Walsh’s lovely photography of all that Florida
scenery, this one is pretty dull and doesn’t even have the saving grace of
being wretched enough to work as camp.

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Last night I screened us
something, if not completely different, at least a departure from what we’d
been watching lately: a download of Verdi’s opera Macbeth as performed in Marseilles on March 20, 1988. The
provenance of the recording was a bit mysterious, though the mediocre visual
quality said that it was a product of several generations’ worth of copying a
VHS original; it was unclear whether this was actually a commercially produced
video or an in-house document (though the prismatic shot of six different
orchestral violinists from six different angles suggested it was made for
release and not just as an historical documentation of the production). The
cast was a good one, headed by Leo Nucci as Macbeth (it was a role he adopted
relatively late in his career and this production was apparently his debut in
it) and Ghena Dimitrova as Lady Macbeth (she was a dramatic soprano who crashed
through the opera world in the 1980’s; born in Bulgaria in 1941, she made her
debut in 1967 as Abigaille in Verdi’s Nabucco but didn’t sing in the U.S. or Britain until the
early 1980’s; she retired in 2001 and died in 2005), though the rest of the
cast was pretty mediocre. The conductor was Michaelangelo Veltri, and while he
used the Marseilles orchestra he bolstered his chorus with professional singers
from Paris. The production was a thoroughly traditional one — they didn’t
decide to reset the opera in Fascist Italy or gangster Chicago or samurai Japan
or the moon or Mars, nor did the director throw in people on bicycles or
rabbits or Cirque du Soleil-type performers or any of the other accoutrements
of what’s come to be called Regietheater. Unfortunately, it was also a pretty dull production dramatically, easy
enough to follow (though the print we were watching was not subtitled, I
figured the story of Macbeth was familiar enough from the play and therefore it would be easy enough
to tell what was going on) but all too pitched towards the egos of the singers
rather than the needs of the drama.

Macbeth was Verdi’s first foray into Shakespeare as a
story source, and he composed the first version for Florence in 1847 to a
libretto by his most frequent collaborator, Francesco Maria Piave, though he
had some parts rewritten by his friend, poet Antonio Maffei. (One particular
sticking point was Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene, which his librettists
kept rewriting even though what Verdi wanted, and kept telling them he wanted,
was merely a literal translation of Shakespeare’s scene into Italian.) Given
that he’d had his first success eight years before with Nabucco, and particularly with the famous “Va, pensiero”
chorus of the Jews held in captivity in Babylon (it had become an unofficial
hymn of the Risorgimento and even
Verdi’s name had become code for the unification of Italy because it also
happened to be the initials for “Vittorio Emmuanele, Re d’Italia”
— “Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy”), he wrote another big chorus, “Patria
oppressa!,” for the Scottish people to sing to lament their lot under the
tyranny of Macbeth’s rule. He also wrote a big aria for the tenor singing
Macduff with which to lament Macbeth’s murder of Macduff’s family, “Ah, la
paterna mano” (he protests the indignity that his “paternal hand” wasn’t around
to save them), but because that’s about the only memorable music the tenor gets
all night it’s not surprising that opera houses don’t usually go out of their
way to hire a major singer for the role (though Pavarotti and Domingo both
recorded it in the sort of “luxury casting” record companies pursued much more
often than live theatres).

Other than that the crux of the score lies in the
big scenes for the Macbeths, especially her — Verdi seems to have been much
more interested in Mrs. than Mr. Macbeth and the most memorable arias in the
score are hers: the opening, “Vieni! T’affreta!,” “La luce langue” (added when
Verdi prepared a revision for Paris in 1865, which was the version followed
here) — when Lady Macbeth prompts her husband to have Banquo and his son
Fleance killed (as all Shakespeare buffs know, Banquo dies but Fleance escapes
and presumably starts the next line of Scottish kings) — the “Brindisi” (in
which she vainly tries to comfort both her husband and the crowd after Banquo’s
ghost appears at their big banquet — this was the scene for which the original
director asked Verdi how you made the ghost appear and disappear on cue, and
Verdi sent him a testy reply saying that he should write to London, where
they’d been performing the same story as a spoken play for over 200 years) and
the sleepwalking scene. I’ve always especially admired the sleepwalking scene
if only because, just 12 years after Donizetti wrote the silly mad scene in Lucia
di Lammermoor that George Bernard Shaw
dismissed as the soprano’s “test of skill with the first flute” (admittedly on
the rare occasions that it’s performed with the glass armonica scoring
Donizetti wanted, it makes a lot more dramatic sense), Verdi wrote a sequence
that in its broken phrasing, its halting delivery and its final ascent to a
D-flat (Verdi asked that the high note not be belted out but be sung with “un
fil di voce” — “a thread of voice”) after an aria previously free of coloratura
fireworks, is absolutely riveting and completely convincing as the ravings of a
madwoman driven crazy by her conscience.

The performance, to the extent to
which we could appreciate it, was good but not great; Leo Nucci was fully in
command of his role until the ending, when he came out of character and encored
Macbeth’s aria “Pietà, rispetto, amore” (the whole piece is considerably
softened from its Shakespearean origins; at the point when Shakespeare’s
Macbeth is raving bitterly about how life is a tale told by an idiot, full of
sound and fury signifying nothing, Verdi’s, Piave’s and Maffei’s is singing
about piety, respect and love! No wonder Tito Gobbi always cut this aria when he sang Macbeth; it wasn’t that he was afraid of its
technical demands, it’s that his dramatic instinct told him it didn’t belong
there, just as “Addio, fiorito asil” really doesn’t belong dramatically where
it falls in Madama Butterfly) and mugged outrageously for the crowd both times. As for Dimitrova,
she certainly had the right voice for Lady Macbeth, but she was in poor form
that night — she missed a high D-flat at the end of the act I ensemble and,
apparently fearful that it would happen again, dodged that note completely at
the end of the sleepwalking scene — and once again a comparison of her to Maria
Callas (who may not have sung the role until 105 years after the premiere but
whose voice fully met the bizarre set of qualifications Verdi specified in a
letter that’s been quoted often) shows just how much more Callas got out of the
words, how much more inflection and phrasing she threw into the big arias and
how, as always, she looked for depth instead of coasting along on sheer vocal
power.

Still, Dimitrova is definitely an above-average Lady Macbeth in one of
the most challenging soprano roles of all time, and the whole production was
worth watching even though there’s a lot more dramatic truth and power to be
mined from this opera even with its weaknesses — I don’t find the witches’
music as silly as some commentators do, but one would think a different sort of
composer could have managed a more credible evocation of the sinister
supernatural (indeed, as German composers like Mozart, Weber and Wagner already
had!). Charles noted that the softening process reached almost absurd heights
at the end, in which Shakespeare’s Macbeth gets shocked when the witches’
prophecies turn out quite differently from what they’d led him to believe
(particularly when Birnam Wood literally advances on Dunsinane castle and he learns Macduff was “not from woman
born, but from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d”) while Verdi’s just gets
stabbed in a swordfight so Macduff, newly crowned King Malcolm and the other
winners can sing a final ensemble over Macbeth’s dead body. I’ve long wanted to
see a production of Verdi’s Macbeth that modeled itself on Orson Welles’ film of the play — that would seem
to provide the right blend of reality and stylization — and maybe even cast a
countertenor as one of the witches in line with Welles’ belief that at least
some of the supernatural characters should be male! In this production, the
closest we got was the inclusion of the ballet (added, like “La luce langue!,”
for the French premiere) and some nice hot shots of both women and men clad in very revealing tights — that was fun, for decidedly unmusical and undramatic
reasons!

The film was Ride ’Em,
Cowboy, sixth in sequence in the
Abbott and Costello boxed set at Universal and a movie of which I have extra-special
childhood memories because my grandfather gave my mom and stepfather a couple
of reels spliced together from home-movie versions of several Universal
features put out by Castle Films and Official Films. Some of these were
self-contained cartoons and some were artfully re-edited sequences from classic
live-action features, including one called No Indians, Please! re-edited from three sequences in Ride ’Em,
Cowboy: the one that introduces
the Indian characters (Lou Costello, playing around at a trading post, picks up
a bow and arrow, shoots it into a heart adorning a tepee, is told that this
means he has to marry the woman who lives there, a hot-looking Indian babe
named Sunbeam [Linda Brent] emerges and Lou likes the idea — until she explains
that the tepee’s owner is her sister Moonbeam [Jody Gilbert], who looks like
Oliver Hardy in drag and quite possibly was actually played by a man on screen), a chase scene
in which Abbott and Costello try to escape the tribe and a final scene (that
actually occurs earlier in the
full feature than the chase) in which Costello ends up in “Dr. Ha-Ha’s
Sanitarium” and the head of the place turns out to be an Indian. (In the
full-length feature he’s really Bud Abbott in “Indian” drag.)

I’d got quite
familiar with this digest version well before I saw the film “complete,” and
when I did it turned out to have some other delights: it was Ella Fitzgerald’s
film debut (she sings “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” on the back of the bus taking the
principals to the Lazy S dude ranch on which most of the film takes place, and
she also adds a few choice interjections to a song called “Rockin’ and Reelin’”
that purports to be a swing version of a square dance) and also the film that
first introduced the song “I’ll Remember April” (though an LP collection called
Music from the Late Show released
in the 1950’s attributed “I’ll Remember April” to the movie Phantom Lady, which actually came out two years later). Ride ’Em, Cowboy was also the fifth and last Abbott and Costello
movie directed by Arthur Lubin, who’d started in films as an actor and had
begun directing in 1934 — he would continue well into the 1960’s, mostly on TV,
and as a director he had a flair for Gothic stylistics but rarely got scripts
that would take advantage of it. (One time he did was the 1940 Universal horror/sci-fi movie Black
Friday; he also threw some
surprisingly noir-ish scenes in the 1947
jazz musical New Orleans, a treasurable film because Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Woody
Herman are in it, though they’re not all that well used.) Plot-wise, Ride
’Em, Cowboy is the old chestnut about
the hot-selling Western writer “Bronco Bob” Mitchell (Dick Foran) whose
exploits are being passed off by his publicist as autobiographical when he’s
not only not a real cowboy but he barely knows which end of a horse is which ­—
which doesn’t stop him from making an entrance in an opening scene at a rodeo
riding — or at least moving on top of — a horse and belting out a nicely
stentorian “Western” ballad by Don Raye and Gene De Paul called “Give Me My
Saddle.”

Abbott and Costello play peanut and hot-dog (respectively) vendors who
get themselves fired and chased off the lot; they hide out in one of the chutes
out of which a bull is supposed to come out for a roping contest, and the bull rides
by Bronco Bob, who panicks at the sight of it and thereby it’s able to gore
Anne Shaw (Anne Gwynne) just before she was supposed to enter a trick-riding
contest which would have won her $10,000 that her dad Sam Shaw (Samuel S.
Hinds) needs to save his Lazy S dude ranch. Bronco Bob offers her a $10,000
check made out to cash, she throws it back in his face, he tosses it to the
ground — “Did he just throw away a $10,000 check made out to cash?” an
incredulous Charles asked at this point — and Lou Costello picks up the check
and tears it up, explaining to Bud Abbott, “It wasn’t even made out to me.”
“Who was it made out to?” says Abbott. “Some guy named Cash,” Costello replies.
The two hide out in a van with more cows and end up on a train bound for the Lazy
S, where Bronco Bob intends to train to learn to do the things for real he’s
been making up in his books — and of course he wants Anne to train him, and
proximity turns her hate into love. There’s also a real cowhand named “Alabam”
Brewster (played by real-life Western star Johnny Mack Brown, who in the late
1920’s had been under contract to MGM and had co-starred with such illustrious
names as Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo — only in 1931 MGM
production chief Irving Thalberg reviewed the rough cut of a new Crawford/Brown
movie called Laughing Sinners, decided Brown wasn’t holding his weight in his scenes, and ordered
everything of his reshot with another actor, Clark Gable — so Gable went on to
be a superstar and Mack Brown got dropped by MGM and picked up by Universal for
a “B” Western series) who’s sort of a rival for Anne’s affections, though
writers Edmund L. Hartmann (“original” story), Harold Shumate (“adaptation”),
True Boardman and John Grant (script) mercifully don’t push that trope too hard.

Between all the Seven Chances-ish stuff of Lou Costello being pursued by a
jumbo-sized Indian drag queen and her/his whole tribe determined to make an
honest man of him, there are some spectacular chase scenes and a subplot of a
band of gangsters trying to fix the final rodeo so the Lazy S loses, and
Mitchell agrees to take the bet against the Lazy S — only he means to win and
the $10,000 is his way of paying off the debt to Anne which he feels he owes
but she was too good to take from him directly. Ride ’Em, Cowboy is one of Abbott and Costello’s best films, with a
good mix of slapstick and dialogue humor (and the slapstick is aided
immeasurably by Universal’s excellent process work — similar sequences in the
later Laurel and Hardy comedies for Hal Roach sometimes fall relatively flat
because the process work is so bad it’s all too clear Stan and Ollie aren’t in
any real danger in that supposedly
“runaway” car) and great singing by Ella Fitzgerald, who essentially is to this
film what the Andrews Sisters were to Buck Privates, In the Navy and Hold That Ghost and Martha Raye was to Keep ’Em Flying. Billed in the original trailer as a “sepia
songstress” (the horribly cutesy-poo way they had of letting the audience know
she was Black), Ella does her star-making hit “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” (which had
hit for her with Chick Webb’s band in 1938, four years before this movie was
made) and also interjects into “Rockin’ and Reelin’,” with a white vocal group
(three men, one women) called the Merry Macs who turned up on some of Judy
Garland’s Decca records at the time and get some pleasant songs here, including
“Beside the Rio Tonto Shore,” used as backdrop for a romantic ride at twilight
through the Iverson Ranch, the fabled Western location where many of the landscape
sequences were shot. Ironically, Ella’s
appearance and (ill) use in this movie is uncomfortably premonitory of the way
the same director, Arthur Lubin, used Billie Holiday in New Orleans five years later. He cast both Ella and Billie as
the white heroine’s maids — and both women seem horribly uncomfortable trying
to get the servile maid's dialogue out of their mouths but visibly loosen up
when they get to sing.

One wishes that Ella could have introduced “I’ll Remember
April” — it’s the sort of lightly jazz-flavored standard she sang so well later
on (in the 1950’s, when the slightly congested quality of her voice in the
early years had cleared up and her voice had become even more beautiful than it
was here) — but instead Dick Foran (who actually had quite a nice voice if you
can handle his stentorian tones and unwillingness to phrase) introduces it by
singing it to Anne Gwynne during one of those long hayrides. Between the long
and inventive slapstick scenes, the nice dialogue bits (though the poker game
in which Costello gets involved is a case of having gone to the well once too
often and doesn’t have the snap of the craps sequence in Buck Privates), the generally good Raye-De Paul songs and an
uninventive but at least serviceable plot (is it only a coincidence that the
plot line involving “Bronco Bob” being the creation of a publicity agent
promoting his books resembles the real-life career of “Buffalo Bill” Cody?), Ride
’Em, Cowboy is a quite entertaining
and very funny film, a worthy one for their last film with their star-making
director, Arthur Lubin (and why he never worked with them again after making five of their best films
is a mystery) and one well balanced between slapstick and dialogue comedy — and
Ella Fitzgerald is just frosting on the cake!

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Charles and I ended the evening watching a really bizarre movie I’d just ordered from the Turner
Classic Movies Web site: The Idle Rich, a 1929 weirdie from MGM directed by William C. DeMille (Cecil B.
DeMille’s older brother — Cecil had got involved in the movie business because
he wanted to do something that would match brother William’s success as a
Broadway stage director; once Cecil became a hugely successful film director,
William came out to Hollywood and managed to win a reputation and some success,
mostly for drawing-room comedies rather than the audacious sex movies and
period spectacles with which Cecil was identified) from a script which began
life as a story by E. F. Stearns that was adapted into a 1925 play by Edith
Ellis called White Collars, one
of the first literary works to use that term as a metaphor for what’s called in
the film’s dialogue the “Great Middle Class,” people who functioned in offices
and assisted the managers of the economy instead of actually being on
construction sites or shop floors making things. The film begins in the office
of multimillionaire William Van Luyn (Conrad Nagel, top-billed — this was
during that era in which Nagel was getting so many roles on the strength of
having established that he had a recordable voice that he complained he and his
wife could no longer go to the movies for their own entertainment since they
couldn’t find a movie to see that he wasn’t in), who makes a rather crude grab
for his secretary, Joan Thayer (Leila Hyams) — she’s on the floor looking for
something and he grips her arm, then pulls her up and passionately kisses her.
In a movie made today, a scene like that would be the start of a huge lawsuit
against him for sexual harassment, but in 1929 what that led to was mutual
passion and ultimately a marriage proposal.

What makes this film — scripted by
Clara Beranger, whose most famous credit was the 1920 Paramount adaptation of
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with John Barrymore — interesting is that instead of
following the clichéd path of having Van Luyn’s snooty upper-class relatives
look down their noses at his white-collar bride (indeed, we get the impression
from this film that William is the only Van Luyn left!), it follows the not-quite-so-clichéd path of having
the other Thayers look down their noses at the snot-nosed rich kid who’s just
married into their clan. William
moves into their apartment (a fascinating set whose furnishings and accessories
indicate what people who weren’t rich themselves but had just as bad taste as
the rich of their day did for décor: they bought hideous couches, chairs,
dishes and the like and tried to be as “stylish” as their budgets could afford), refuses to sleep in his wife’s bed and
curls up on one of those hideously ugly (as well as way too small for him) couches, and when he’s not at the
office lets himself get lectured by the other Thayers: the parents (James Neill
and Edythe Chapman), Joan’s sister Helen (Bessie Love, who out-acts the two
leads), their brother Frank (Kenneth Gibson) and their nephew Henry (Robert
Ober), who makes vaguely radical political pronouncements and seems to be the
only one of the Thayers without a job. (The script is sloppy enough that it’s
only about two-thirds into the film that we realize Henry is a nephew and not
another Thayer sibling.)

The movie rather drones on from there, perched
uneasily between comedy and drama and not working all that well as either, and
one misses either the sort of all-out comedic approach Chaplin or Keaton would
have brought to a story like this or the genuine sentiment Frank Capra could
have supplied if he’d been
directing this. Then the third act begins — the film is divided by intertitles
and it’s clear they fall where the original intermission curtains of the play
did — and Van Luyn announces that Henry has talked him into giving away his
entire fortune and living the rest of his life as a member of the Great Middle
Class himself. Just then Thayer père
announces that he’s been fired because his employer wants to bring in a younger
man. Along the way Van Luyn is accosted by Helen’s boyfriend, truckdriver Tom
Gibney (Paul Kruger, a tall, lanky actor who looks like an unformed beta
version of Clark Gable but hardly has anything resembling Gable’s charisma or
talent), who challenges him to a fight — which Van Luyn wins easily, presumably
through boxing moves he learned in prep school. Van Luyn eventually reveals
that he had no intention of giving all his money away — he just said that in order to get the Thayers to
allow him to move them into a new house he’s going to build for his new
extended clan

The Idle Rich is
an odd movie not only because it’s uncertainly perched between Left and Right
message-wise — the moral, to the extent there is one, is that once you latch
onto a rich guy make sure he stays
rich so he can lavish the benefits of a fortune on your and your family, and
above all don’t him get any damned-fool notions about philanthropy — but for a
1929 talkie it’s technically crude in some ways and highly sophisticated in
others. There is no background
music, other than a phonograph supposedly belonging to one of the Thayers’
neighbors that plays a really old and scratchy pop record about true love (the
first time we hear it it’s clearly supposed to be an ironic contrast with what
we’ve just seen before it, which is Joan Thayer seeing William Van Luyn into
his voluntary exile from her bedroom), not even under the opening credits, and
there are several parts of the movie in which the sound stops altogether and
other parts in which the actors make audible slips in their lines and Big
Brother DeMille didn’t stop to retake. But for a 1929 talkie the staging of the
dialogue scenes is surprisingly naturalistic and modern: there are none of the
long … dreary … pauses between lines that make a lot of early talkies virtually
unwatchable today; the actors speak in normal tones of voice, phrase their
conversations as they would in real life, and even interrupt each other and
talk at once when they’re playing people having an argument. (Watching a movie
like Behind That Curtain, a
virtual compendium of everything that could go wrong in an early talkie, one can readily see why some
critics of the time actually thought sound films were less, not more, realistic than silent ones.)

My big
problem with The Idle Rich is
that I have a hard time with movies whose makers couldn’t decide whether they
were comedy or drama, so they tried to make them both and succeed only in
making them neither; for much of the first two acts I was wishing MGM had gone
all-out for comedy and cast Buster Keaton in Nagel’s role, not only because
Beranger’s script obliges Nagel to do some rather wimpy-looking pratfalls and a
slapstick master like Keaton could have made these scenes uproarious, but
because with Keaton in the lead this film would have been a worthy successor to
The Navigator, Battling Butler
and the other Keaton silents in which (in what I’ve long thought was a
deliberate attempt to differentiate himself from Chaplin’s “Tramp” by setting
himself up clear at the other end of the socioeconomic scale) he played
upper-class twits brought down to earth by the love of a good but much less
affluent woman. But Keaton would have had a much harder time playing Act III —
and Nagel, as overly made up, pasty-faced and whiny as he is (in the 1931 film The
Right of Way he was clearly miscast in a
potentially powerful role that cried out for John Barrymore), actually works
for this part: a stuck-up man who’s trying to get himself un-stuck but isn’t
always getting the best advice from the people he’s around.

Friday, March 23, 2012

Last night’s “feature” was just half an hour long, an
archive.org download of a really peculiar unsold pilot for a TV show that
probably sounded like a good idea in theory but went sadly awry in the
execution — an entertaining jumble, but still a jumble. It was called The
Plot Thickens and it was made in 1963 as a
co-production of sci-fi/horror schlockmeister William Castle and John Guedel, who had achieved
success as the producer of Groucho Marx’s hit (three years on radio and then
nine years on TV) quiz show You Bet Your Life. The gimmick on this one was that a group of
panelists, which would always include Groucho (this time he was a perpetual
contestant rather than the series host), would sit down and watch a short movie
about a murder and then they — Groucho, a fellow celebrity, a rank-and-file
audience member and Richard Halley, an actual private detective based in
Hollywood — would try to solve the crime. (Just how they determined who
“really” done it is something of a mystery, since it would seem easy enough for
the producers to adjust the script of the film-within-the-show to reflect the
outcome they wanted rather than
the one the original writer might have had in mind.) In this sample episode —
the only one filmed, since no network or syndicator picked the show up and
ordered more — the amateurs, besides Groucho, were Stan Ross, an ad executive
from Coney Island; and Jan Sterling, the marvelous actress from Billy Wilder’s Ace
in the Hole (had that film been a success
Sterling would have headed to stardom on a rocket — her performance as the
amoral opportunist who’s married to the pathetic cave-in victim and is grabbing
the main chance while virtually burning up the screen with pent-up sexuality is
one of the greatest things about that film, along with Kirk Douglas’s finest
and, alas, final villain role: after 1951 he’d got to be too big a star to be
cast as a heavy), the 1956 version of 1984 and several other quirky movies.

The mystery film is surprisingly well
done, though not surprisingly
it’s little more than a chip off the cliché log; it was written by Robert
Bloch, the author of Psycho (and
also a close friend of H. P. Lovecraft — to the extent that the famously
reclusive Lovecraft had any close
friends — and if you read the novel Psycho, with its depiction of a middle-aged Norman Bates not
only living in his ancestral home but obsessively clinging to his mother’s
possessions, it’s clear that Bloch’s conception of Norman Bates was based on
Lovecraft even though most of the similarities were eliminated by Alfred
Hitchcock and his writer, Joseph
Stefano, when they made the film) and directed by William D. Russell. It’s the
old chestnut about the phony “psychic” who rips off gullible suckers with the
usual gimcrackery, projected images supposedly representing the shades of the
marks’ deceased loved ones and a trumpet-like horn hanging from the ceiling on
wires through which the voices of the dear departed are supposedly regaling the
living in a séance. The most interesting part of the story-within-a-story is
that the phony mystic, Kazam (Arthur Batanides), is killed in the middle of a
séance, while everyone is holding their neighbors’ hands — an interesting
variation on the locked-room concept and one that gets resolved in much the
same sort of trick way most locked-room mysteries do [spoiler alert!]: the victim’s wife Lois (Linda Bennett) actually
killed him before the séance
began, then propped him up at the table so it would appear to the other
participants that he was simply in a trance, not actually dead. She worked this
deception out with her lover, Kazam’s assistant Arnold Martin (James Callahan),
who agreed to cover for her in hopes of getting to flee the country with
Kazam’s ill-gotten gains, and the purpose of the whole thing was to fleece some
of the suckers one last time instead of fleeing town as Kazam, worried that the
jig was up, had insisted on doing.

Among the suckers were Carleton Lowe (Jay
Adler), who brought a large amount of cash to the séance in exchange for the
materialization of his teenage daughter, and also brought along a gun,
intending to shoot Kazam if he turned out to be a fake; and Martha Collins
(Kathryn Givney), who wasn’t a sucker herself but was pissed off that she’d
become disabled in an accident and her brother Sid (Frederic Downs) was
throwing away all her insurance money on worthless stocks Kazam had touted to
him. Of course, it turns out at the séance that Martha isn’t disabled at all —
she had been but had laboriously, and without Sid or anyone else noticing,
retrained her legs and regained her ability to walk (yeah, right) — and she too brought along a gun and shot Kazam,
but didn’t kill him because he was already dead. There are several other
characters but the MC, Jack Linkletter (Art Linkletter’s son, the oldest of
Art’s five children; ironically, though he lived to be 70 both his parents survived him!), announces that a
(fictional) private detective on the scene, Penfield (Joe Maross), had already
cleared them, so the four suspects get hauled in front of the panel, who get to
ask them questions to try to figure out whodunit. The prize is $500 to any panelist
who correctly guesses the murderer, which is upped to $1,000 in case they’re
right and the professional private eye on the panel, Richard Halley (ya
remember Richard Halley?), is
wrong — and [spoiler alert again!]
Groucho Marx guesses right, Richard Halley guesses wrong and Groucho gets to
take home the $1,000.

It’s a peculiar show in that the genre clashes between hard-edged mystery and game show
really don’t come off, and Groucho’s attempts at humor are chuckle-inducing
instead of laugh-out-loud funny: one suspects the limitations of the format as
well as the absence of anyone he can play off against (as he did with his
brothers in his movies and with the contestants as the host of You
Bet Your Life) held him back. His fellow
panelists are not only unmoved by his witticisms but seem positively annoyed
with his joke-cracking, as if no one bothered to tell them that this was simply
a game show about a fictional
murder instead of an investigation into a real one! There are two other
characters, a “bailiff” named Warrene Ott — that’s a woman, in case you
couldn’t guess from the final “e” — clad in black velvet tights and equipped
with a tail to make her look like a cat (they might well have borrowed the look
from the Catwoman in the Batman
comics) — and a real cat, also a
female (or so we’re told) called Lucifer, whose face is the opening close-up of
the show as the stentorian narrator announces its title and central premise. The
Plot Thickens is an interesting curio but
it’s not surprising no one picked this show up for an ongoing run; it’s hard to
imagine how far they could have gone with such a bizarre concept or how long
they could have kept it on the air, and as it stands it’s probably more an
oddment for Marx Brothers completists than truly compelling entertainment — but
the sheer weirdness of the gimmick gives it some sort of enduring appeal.

Turner Classic Movies was
showing a truly weird Vitaphone short from 1934 (it bore Production Code
certificate #68) called simply Vaudeville, that purported to depict a vaudeville bill featuring a dog act called
Carl Emmy and His Mad Wags; a dance group called the Three Queens (an ironic
title today because it was actually three women dressed as men — white shirts,
black pants, black neckties and short, slicked-down hair — doing an act that
today would be referred to as “drag king”!); Jack Pepper and His Society Pets
(a singer whose act was disrupted by a comedy band, sort of like the act Spike
Jones did a decade later); and the headliners, little-person dance couple
George and Olive Brasno and normal-sized Buster Shaver, who was their piano
accompanist for part of the act and took George’s place as Olive’s dance
partner for part of it. The Three Queens were by far the best part of this
short — it helped that one of the songs they danced to was Duke Ellington’s
“It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” a surprising choice for a
1934 movie (but then since Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” was in another 1934
Warners musical short, it’s possible Irving Mills, who then managed Ellington
and published his music, had an “in” with someone at Warners to place
Ellington’s songs in these films), though the shots of Buster Shaver twirling
diminutive Olive Brasno around himself and playing with her like a kid with a
Barbie doll were pretty weird!

Earlier in the day Charles
and I had run an archive.org download that was even weirder: Soda Squirt, apparently the last of the Flip the Frog cartoons
Ub Iwerks turned out during the early 1930’s. To recap: Iwerks had been an
associate of Walt Disney in his early days in Kansas City and had been a much
better artist; he’d come out to Hollywood to join Disney at his first company,
Laugh-O-Gram, to work on the Alice’s Adventures in Cartoonland films (Disney’s early one-reelers in which a
live-action girl played Alice fooled around with animated characters; the
process work was no problem since Alice cavorted in front of a white screen, so
it was easy enough to double-print her into animation that was also done on a
white background) and then the more complicated Oswald the Rabbit movies. When Disney lost the rights to the Oswald
character in a fight with his distributor and he had to come up with a
replacement, pronto, it was Iwerks who actually designed the replacement,
Mickey Mouse. Disney cut a deal with one of early Hollywood’s shadiest
entrepreneurs, Pat Powers, for distribution and the use of his sound system to
make Steamboat Willie, the
first sound cartoon and the film that put Disney on the map. Then Disney and
Powers had a fight over royalties, and Powers, deciding that Iwerks was the
more talented of the two, offered to back Iwerks in a cartoon series of his own
if he quit Disney, and Iwerks accepted and started a new series with a
character called Flip the Frog. (It’s an indication of Iwerks’ design
priorities that Oswald the Rabbit, Mickey Mouse and Flip the Frog look so
similar despite the real-life differences in appearance between rabbits, mice
and frogs.)

Iwerks’ career as an independent lasted four years and ended with Soda
Squirt, credited here to
“Celebrity Productions, Inc.” but apparently actually distributed through MGM
(!), following which his studio closed down and he returned to Disney, where
Disney never forgave him for his prior disloyalty and kept him deep in the
background, allowing him to work on technical innovations (like the famous
Multiplane camera which created the illusion of three-dimensionality in
animation and allowed the use of tracking shots in cartoons for the first time)
and occasionally loaning him out (he was the main special-effects person on
Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds) but never really trusting him again. Soda Squirt is an astonishing movie in which the opening of
Flip’s soda parlor manages to attract a wide variety of (well-caricatured)
movie stars of the period, including Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Jimmy
Durante and Buster Keaton, the Four Marx Brothers (who whip out four straws so
they can simultaneously drink out of the same soda glass), Mae West (who quite
naturally attracts the libidinous attentions of both Harpo and Flip!) and a
rather queeny blond man who’s the recipient of one of Flip’s wildest
concoctions which turns him into Mr. Hyde as Fredric March played him in
Paramount’s 1932 film — only a can of something labeled “Pansy Spray” turns him
back into the effeminate creature he was at the beginning (looking nothing like Fredric March as Dr. Jekyll). I hadn’t
realized there were any such things as “‘Pre-Code’ cartoons,” but here was one!

Thursday, March 22, 2012

This morning I watched a
recording of a Lifetime movie from last November, We Have Your Husband, supposedly based on a true story about a
kidnapping in Mexico in 2007 — though the trailers shown for it then had not
made it clear that it was set in Mexico and the only real difference between it
and quite a number of other Lifetime movies in which the heroine’s bucolic
existence is disrupted by some horrible peril for herself and/or her family is
that the scenes of the bucolic existence in the exposition are accompanied by
mariachi music, strummed guitars and other cheesy music cues to establish
“Mexicanicity.” The woman in peril is Jayne Valseca (Teri Polo), a U.S.-born
blonde who 15 years previously married a Mexican, Eduardo Valseca (Esai
Morales, about the only person in this cast I’d heard of before), and settled with
him on his ranch outside the Mexican town of Santa Natale (“birthplace of the
saints”?) in the state of Guanajuato. All is going well for them — though he’s
the son of a Mexican media baron (“the William Randolph Hearst of Mexico,”
we’re obligingly told in the dialogue) he only has a small income plus a
$500,000 bank account that is solely in his name, but he’s got a Texas
investor, Col. Wimberly (William R. Moses), interested in buying part of the
ranch to build a golf course for $8 million — until one day, when Jayne
and Eduardo are returning home after dropping their kids off at school and
their SUV is surrounded on the road by four other cars.

Both of them are
kidnapped by four men wearing ski masks, and eventually she escapes — she’s
left in the back of a van with a hammer, symbol of a Mexican revolutionary
political group called the EPR, which tells the AFI agent (apparently those are
the real initials of the name of the Mexican national police, usually
colloquially known as the Federales) Raul (Nicholas Gonzalez, a hot, sexy and very intense performer who
out-acts the principals) that it’s a political kidnapping and they are unlikely
to kill the kidnap victim but that the ransom demand is likely to be high. (Over)directed by Eric
Bross from a teleplay by J. B. White, We Have Your Husband (a bit of a misnomer because by taking both
members of the couple, then releasing her, the kidnappers let it be known that
they have her husband without having to tell her so in so many words) is
nonetheless a pretty exciting movie even though I watched through most of it
expecting a reversal that either the local police or someone the couple knew
well (like Eduardo’s friend Gustavo Otero, played by Danny Mora) was in on the
crime and faked it to look like a political kidnapping — the kidnappers, whoever they were, had
clearly done a lot of research about the family, knowing (among other things)
about the $8 million deal for the golf course (which predictably falls through
during the course of the story — a kidnapping isn’t the greatest encouragement
for U.S. investors to sink a lot of money in a tourist-oriented project in a
Mexican town) and even where in the U.S. Eduardo and Jayne met 15 years earlier.

But no such plot
twist came, though there was an ironic situation in which director Bross
intercut between scenes of Eduardo being tortured (supposedly the kidnappers
cut off one of his ears — though when he’s finally released and comes home to
his family Esai Morales’s head looks normal, with the full complement of ears
nature and the gene pool gave him — and also shot him with a gun at point-blank
range in a way that wouldn’t hurt him but would scare the shit out of his wife
when she saw the video they e-mailed her) with shots of a police raid on an EPR
encampment where they were holding a kidnap victim — a different one, it turns out. There are some of the usual
problems with this movie — among them the predictable one that it takes place
in a dream vision of “Mexico” in which everyone speaks accented but
linguistically impeccable English — but in the end it’s one of those films in
which the basic story is so exciting it triumphs over ineptitudes in the
execution (and I’d also like to note for future reference the name of
Christopher Saavedra, who plays the Valsecas’ appealingly long-haired son
Diego) and though the final scene is pretty cornball — Eduardo, disheveled,
with a grey beard and wearing pants too big for him (I guess we’re supposed to
believe he lost that much weight in captivity), shows up back at the ranch the
night of Diego’s birthday party — the note just before the closing credits,
which says that the kidnappers have never been caught and the Valsecas have
never returned to the ranch they once loved so much, has the uncertainty of
real life about it rather than the neat loose-ends tying-up of a fiction story.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Last night’s “feature” was the next in sequence from the
Abbott and Costello boxed set featuring all 28 of their films for Universal: Keep
’Em Flying, third and last of the A&C
“service comedies.” Having already done the Army (Buck Privates) and the Navy (In the Navy), this time they did the Army Air Corps (it was only
after World War II that the U.S. Air Force separated from the army and became a
separate service of its own) — and though this film suffered from the absence
of the Andrews Sisters (although we did get Martha Raye in a dual role to compensate!) it seems to me the most
entertaining of the three. After having read about the tortures of the damned
Universal went through trying to get In the Navy approved by the Navy brass (they had to change an
hilariously bungled set of ship’s maneuvers into a dream of Lou Costello’s character), it’s surprising how
many elaborate A&C slapstick routines there are in this movie, including
one in which he’s riding a torpedo that goes out of control on the Army Air
Corps training base (played by the Cal-Aero flight school in Ontario,
California, which was being used by the real Army Air Corps for training) and another in which
A&C get caught in an airplane they don’t know how to fly and have to
crash-land it after some quite amusing complications. (Kudos also to John P.
Fulton for his absolutely convincing special effects and process work — and to
Ralph Cedar, who took over the direction of the torpedo scene even though
Arthur Lubin was credited for the rest of the movie.)

The plot isn’t much —
“original” (quotes definitely
appropriate!) story writer Edmund L. Hartmann and screenwriters True Boardman
(I joked, “This is a True story”), Nat Perrin and John Grant combined two of
the oldest clichés of military aviation movies, the hotshot barnstorming pilot
(“Jinx Roberts,” played by Dick Foran) who shows up at the training camp
arrogantly maintaining that no one needs to teach him to fly, who eventually learns that flying in the Air
Corps requires discipline and teamwork; and the scared pilot “Jimmy” Joyce
(Charles Lang) who can’t solo because he watched his dad, also a flyer, crack
up and get killed — but the movie is a lot of fun: Foran is personable and his
love interest, Carol Bruce as Jimmy’s sister Linda Joyce (a band singer who
joins the USO and just happens to
get assigned to a USO camp near the Cal-Aero school), is personable and has a
nice voice that does justice to the old George Bassman song “I’m Getting
Sentimental Over You” and the new songs by Don Raye and Gene DePaul, notably
“The Boy with the Wistful Eyes.

The writers also created some great gags for
the twin Martha Rayes, who through her dual casting gets to play romantic
scenes opposite both Abbott and
Costello: the Raye who’s attracted to Costello is raucous Gloria Phelps and the
one who’s drawn to Abbott is the more sedate sister Barbara. “The Boy with the
Wistful Eyes,” a quite lovely song that deserves to be better known, is staged
in a tunnel of love in which Foran and Bruce, Abbott and Raye number one, and
Costello and Raye number two, are all taking a ride — and, amazingly, instead
of singing her two choruses the same way Martha Raye phrases the song
differently depending on which character she’s playing. As Gloria she’s her usual
raucous self — the one who’d become known from her movies at Paramount before
she went to Universal for the 1941 Olsen and Johnson film Hellzapoppin’ — while as Barbara she phrases surprisingly like
Billie Holiday, especially copying Billie’s famous “dying falls” (the downward
glissandi with which Billie frequently ended a line). Raye also gets to sing a
boogie-woogie number called “Pig Foot Pete,” which was nominated for an Academy
Award (though for some reason Universal attributed it to Hellzapoppin’! — remember that at this time the Best Song nominees
were picked by the studios, not Academy voters), with Freddie Slack at the
piano. (Slack also recorded the song for Decca, but with Don Raye — no relation
­— singing the vocal.)

Keep ’Em Flying is a superb movie, well balanced between comedy, romantic and musical
scenes, and it’s only a pity that this was A&C’s last service film — well,
they’d run out of units of the armed forces (they weren’t about to do one about
the Coast Guard or the merchant marine!) — and Arthur Lubin’s direction is
surprisingly Gothic in some sequences (especially the one in which Costello
gets lost in a house-of-horrors attraction at a carnival and Lubin and
production designer Jack Otterson get to recycle some of the old props left
over from Universal’s horror films); though his five films with Abbott and
Costello were the biggest hits of his career, he seems to have been more
interested in Gothic and noir
atmospherics than in comedy, and there are some odd angles showing the Air Corps
cadets getting up — the camera is tilted and the Venetian blinds of their rooms
cast artistic and noir-ish
shadows over their faces.

The archive.org download
was a 1950 half-hour TV episode of something called The Buster Keaton Show, a live telecast from L.A. (supposedly the only
episode from this series known to exist!) sponsored by the Studebaker Dealers
of Los Angeles (and since my stepfather had a 1950 Studebaker there was a
personal bit of nostalgia for me in looking at that car, with its
spacecraft-style front end designed by the legendary Raymond Loewy, again!), in
which Keaton (in his 50’s and definitely looking the worse for wear — the years
of alcoholism had taken their toll on him, though he was still surprisingly
spry physically and it was amazing how well he was able to do slapstick live!) plays a man who goes in for physical training and
ends up practicing in the ring with a fighter who’s legendary for beating the
crap out of anyone who looks on his wife with lust. The script, not
surprisingly (especially given that Clyde Bruckman, one of Keaton’s key
collaborators from his glory years in the 1920’s, is one of the credited
writers), rips off a lot of the
Keaton silents, including Battling Butler and Spite Marriage, and the tackiness of the production has to be seen to be believed (not
only the cheesy sets common to live TV shows but the audible mistakes made by
the actors), but Keaton manages to maintain his dignity and be quite amusing if
not as laugh-out-loud funny as he was in the 1920’s. Ironically, within five years Clyde Bruckman, broke (largely because he’d been sued for plagiarism by Harold Lloyd — for reusing gags Bruckman had originally creted for Lloyd!) and out of work, shot himself in a Beverly Hills restaurant with a gun Keaton had loaned him — a real pity for the co-director of Keaton’s greatest films, Sherlock, Jr. and The General, as well as two of W. C. Fields’ best, the short The Fatal Glass of Beer and the feature The Man on the Flying Trapeze.

Saturday, March 17, 2012

The good movie we
watched as part of our double feature last night (after the bad one, Bowanga
Bowanga — see below) was Beginners, the quite charming if flawed 2010 romantic comedy
that for some quirky reason relating to the Academy’s eligibility criteria
competed for the Academy Awards this
year with the films of 2011, and won the award for Christopher Plummer as Best
Supporting Actor. It was written and directed by Mike Mills, who has 10
previous directorial credits on imdb.com but most of them for shorts,
documentaries or TV shows; his only previous theatrical feature was Thumbsucker from 2005, which as the title suggests is about
Justin Cobb (Lou Taylor Pucci), who’s continued to suck his thumb even though
he’s now a teenager already. That’s a pretty good indication of the kind of
quirky humor you’ll get in Beginners, which is about Oliver Fields (Ewan McGregor), an alienated 38-year-old
man with a bad relationship history and a potentially creative but actually
frustrating job as a commercial illustrator (it’s somewhat surprising that
there’s still enough demand for commercial illustrators that someone can make a
living at it — especially since Oliver draws freehand instead of creating his
art on a computer), who in the space of four years suffered a triple whammy in
connection with his parents: first his mother died after a long struggle with
cancer, then his father Hal (Christopher Plummer) came out to him as Gay, and
then his father got cancer and
died after a long struggle …

Through all of this Oliver is also exploring his
own sexual and emotional territory with Anna (Mélanie Laurent), whom he meets
in one of the most bizarre meet-cutes in cinema history: he’s at a costume
party he’s been brought to by his co-workers, and he’s come dressed as Siegmund
Freud and is so into the role he not only looks the part, he’s steering the other guests onto a
couch and doing amateur psychoanalysis on them. She’s also dressed as a man,
complete with short bobbed-hair wig and a suit and tie, and when they meet she
has lost her voice due to laryngitis and can only communicate with him by
writing in a notepad, like Beethoven. The film plays fast and loose with the
time sequence — too fast and
loose for my taste: I don’t mind non-linear storytelling but I like the
director to play fair and at least make it clear when as well as where we are, and sometimes the only way
we have of telling when in Oliver’s life a particular scene takes place is
whether or not Christopher Plummer is in it. (The film begins with Oliver
cleaning up his late father’s house and throwing away his unused chemotherapy
pills — I couldn’t help but wonder what his flushing all those toxic chemicals
down his toilet is going to do to the aquatic creatures who encounter them
later — and so the only scenes in which we see Christopher Plummer are
flashbacks).

One problem with Beginners is it’s really two movies in one, and the movie about the
septuagenarian suddenly stepping into the Queer world is considerably more
interesting than the hetero story between Oliver and Anna. Maybe it’s because
Mike Mills’ own father came out as Gay late in his life, or maybe Mills is simply better at writing
characters of his own gender than the other — whatever it is, though, Anna
comes off as pretty much a cipher, a rag-bag of neuroses and indicia of movie
alienation thrown together in a characterization that never quite attains
believability as a human being, despite Laurent’s best efforts in a role whose
essence pretty much eludes her (and the audience, this member of it anyway).
Had the film stayed focused on Oliver and his birth parents (we see mom in
flashbacks and discover that, among other things, the only kind of music she
listened to was jazz and pop from the 1920’s, mostly by African-American
artists, a taste Oliver inherited from her and which Mills makes great use of
on his soundtrack, filling it with excerpts from Jelly Roll Morton’s Library of
Congress recordings and discs by Gene Austin, Mamie Smith and Josephine Baker)
and the traumas he went through adjusting to his mom’s death, his dad’s
sexuality and his dad’s death, in that order, the film would have been much
stronger and we might have had a sense that Oliver was learning from all of
this and becoming someone who might have a better chance at a relationship of
his own in the future. As things work out, though, there’s a “cute”
reconciliation between Oliver and Anna after a whole movie in which their
scenes together, even the ones in bed, show just how far apart they are and how
much work they’d have to put into their relationship to bridge the gaps between
them and stay together.

Oddly, there are two characters in the film who
impressed me more than the much-ballyhooed leads: one was Arthur, the dog
Oliver inherits from Hal (and which actually gets dialogue — sort of; we see
subtitles interpreting his thoughts for us and presumably translating them from
Dog to English), played by a Jack Russell breed dog named Cosmo who if the
Academy gave awards for Best Performance by a Dog would have given the charming
mutt in The Artist a run for his
money. The other was Goran Visnjic as Andy, Hal’s late-in-life lover, and
though Mills introduces his character with a wince-inducing cliché (he explains
to Oliver that he was thrown out by his own father when he came out as Gay, and
as a result “I’ve always been attracted to older men” — which made me lean back
and think, “Oh, no, not that old
stereotype again!”) he’s charismatic, charming and fully believable even though
he’s put on the pounds and is no longer the tough, wiry fellow I remember from The
Deep End (another Gay-themed movie!), and
if anyone from this movie deserved an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor
it was Visnjic, not Plummer (who probably got the award more because he’s 82
years old and he’d never received one before despite a long track record of
excellent performances in roles that showcased him better than this one did —
it’s not anywhere nearly as bad as Al Pacino winning for an awful performance
in an awful film, Scent of a Woman,
after having been passed over for all his great movies, but it’s still more a
consolation Oscar than a truly deserved one, especially since Mills only gives
us this character in dribs and drabs and Visnjic actually probably has more
screen time than Plummer).

What saves Beginners is the very real charm of its vignettes — Hal,
trying to cope with the Queer lifestyle as it is in the 2000’s (as opposed to
what it was in the 1950’s when he did his dive into the closet for
“respectability” after his therapist told him homosexuality was a mental
illness and his wife-to-be said, “I know what you are, but I can fix that” —
lines that will be wincingly familiar to any Queer who lived through the 1950’s
or has read the literature from and about the period), calls Oliver from a Gay
club and asks what the music they’re playing is called; Hal joins the Prime
Timers group for Gay seniors and they have a movie night at which they show The
Times of Harvey Milk; Andy’s worry that he
won’t be allowed in the hospital room as Hal dies because he isn’t “family”
(I’ve heard enough horror stories about this that I’m sure it’s real, but when
John Gabrish was dying in 1989 I was allowed in the hospital virtually anywhere
I wanted to go, including the intensive care unit, and more recently when I’ve
had hernia surgeries no one has looked twice at the family member who was there
to support me through the process and drive me home after the operation was
Charles); Oliver’s professional flame-out when he’s asked to do a CD cover for
a rock band called “The Sads” and instead of doing a simple illustration of the
group’s members from their photos, he does an elaborate comic book on the
history of sadness (which they, of course, reject); and the final reconciliation
between Oliver and Anna, which takes place when she’s announced she’s returning
to her place in New York (she travels around so much she hasn’t had a fixed
abode in L.A., where most of this film takes place, and spends much of her life
living in hotel rooms), he flies cross-country to meet her there, and when he
calls her to ask her to let him in it turns out she’s still in L.A. — she never
left! Beginners is a quiet,
gentle comedy that will touch you without really wrenching your heartstrings;
it’s also that frustrating sort of film that’s good as it stands but could
easily have been even better.

The bad movie was Bowanga Bowanga: White Sirens of
Africa, which I’d just got in an order from
TCM Home Video on a DVD from the “Something Weird” label — with two other films
on the same disc, Wild Women of Wongo and Virgin Sacrifice. The
film was preceded by a promo for Something Weird showing some of the other
items in their catalog, including some of the early Russ Meyer nudies and
Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast
and Wizard of Gore, two films
you’d have to pay me to see.
Apparently shot under the working title Wild Women, Bowanga Bowanga is a 1951 production from something called
Continental Pictures, produced, written and directed by Norman Dawn, and which
opens over stock footage of Africa’s jungle regions with an unctuous narrator
explaining that some of the stories about Africa are from people’s imaginations
and some are true, and hinting that the plot of this film is the latter when
it’s actually quite obviously from a very impoverished human imagination.
Indeed, there’s so much stock footage in this movie that it approaches — far
more than any of Ed Wood’s own movies did — the aspiration Wood once had (or at
least was claimed for him by the writers of the Ed Wood biopic, directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny
Depp) to make a movie entirely out of stock footage without any original
shooting at all. Between the stock clips — some of them awesomely beautiful,
some of them just tacky — and the wall-to-wall musical score (at times during
this film you’ll wonder what’s older, the stock footage or the stock music),
this film isn’t “weird” or even campily bad so much as just annoying.

The star
is Lewis Wilson, who eight years earlier had become the first actor to play
Batman on screen — and in some ways the best; certainly he was more credible in
the Bruce Wayne identity than anyone in the role since, and he was in good
shape but still looked visibly weary after every action scene, reminding us
that Batman wasn’t a super-powered person but an ordinary human who had willed himself to be a superhero and had trained, both
physically and intellectually, for the job. Alas, by the time he made this
Wilson was eight years older, considerably less athletic and far less
challenged by this role than he’d been by the Caped Crusader. He plays Trent,
who goes off into the African jungle for a hunt with his buddy Kirby (Mort
Thompson) and while there meets another white guy, a comic-relief character
named Count Sparafucile (Don Orlando). Any opera buff will recognize the name
instantly as the hit-man in Verdi’s opera Rigoletto whom the title character, jester at the court of the
Duke of Mantua, hires to kill the Duke for despoiling Rigoletto’s daughter
Gilda — only Gilda, who’s genuinely fallen for the Duke, gets killed in the
Duke’s place. The Rigoletto
reference in the character’s name is obviously deliberate on Norman Dawn’s part
because throughout the movie Sparafucile sings the aria “Caro nome” from Rigoletto, which is sung in the opera by Gilda as she’s
dreaming of the hot young guy who’s been cruising her from outside her window
and has disguised himself as the student “Gualtier Maldé” when he’s really the
lecherous Duke. Anyway, after a lot
of stock footage of various spectacular animal fauna (including an elk, which
is not native to Africa) Trent
sees a vision of a woman standing on the edge of a cliff, silhouetted against
the sun, singing in a haunting “vapor voice” and creating the one genuinely
impressive image in any of the footage Dawn shot for this movie (as opposed to
the enormous accumulation of stock in the rest of the film). Eventually the
three intrepid hunters meet the white sirens of Africa — a group of women who
look like calendar models of the period (and probably were!) and who either
babble to each other in a made-up gibberish tongue that’s supposed to represent
their native language, or mangle English in a way that’s not discernible as
anywhere close to a real accent of anyone in the actual world who’s learned
English as a second language.

Eventually the queen of the sirens orders Trent
to fight the best warrior in her tribe to figure out if he’s strong enough to
be worthy of her; if he wins, he’ll be married to the queen and provide the
necessary male input to propagate their race, and if he loses he’ll be thrown
into a pit of fire supposedly representing a sacrifice to the tribe’s “Fire
God” (though we never actually see the pit — Norman Dawn’s budget obviously
didn’t extend to that). At first he’s visibly reluctant to fight a girl — even
one who’s obviously in better shape than he is — but eventually he wins, and
meanwhile the other women in the tribe are fomenting a revolution because they
don’t see any particular need to off the other two guys just so the queen can
be the only one who gets a man for herself. Finally the white guys get away and
run through the fields of jungle, or whatever, and they’re accompanied by the
cutest and most domesticated of the sirens, who becomes Trent’s girlfriend. Bowanga
Bowanga is the sort of frustrating movie
that isn’t quite bad enough to become camp and isn’t good enough to work as
anything else — and though the setting is Africa instead of outer space, it’s
really the same sort of plot as Fire Maidens from Outer Space, Queen
of Outer Space, Cat Women on the Moon and
all those other weird male-fantasy movies of the 1950’s in which an intrepid
group of males end up in an all-female community and put out enough pheromones
to let the girls (not women, girls)
know what they’ve been missing.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

I began last night’s movie
watching with an interesting download of a 2009 concert from Munich, called the
“International Musikwettbewerb” — I don’t know what the word “Musikwettbewerb”
means (I took a semester of German in college but I’ve forgotten most of it and
just about the only German words that have stuck are the ones that recur in
Wagner’s libretti!) but the show itself was a showcase for first-prize winners
in some sort of musical contest. I can’t help but wonder if this is a sort of German
Idol with better (or at least
more “serious”) music than the U.K. and U.S. versions (indeed, I’m dreading
that some day someone will do a modern-dress production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser with the title character as a drug addict going
through cycles of recovery and relapse, and the second-act song contest staged
under a huge neon sign reading “German Idol”!).

The orchestra was the Bavarian
Radio Symphony (though so few musicians were visible on screen I suspect the
show was done with reduced forces), the conductor was Lawrence Renes (who
looked on-screen like an efficient bureaucrat, the sort of person you meet at
the bank who tells you your stack of document is about 10 to 15 papers short of
what you need to apply for relief from foreclosure) and the prize-winning
soloists were bassist Gunars Upatnieks, soprano Anita Watson (she’s from an
English-speaking country but not the one you’d think: Australia), harpist
Emmanuel Ceysson (he was introduced as a French contestant but he was
interviewed in English, , and it was frustrating to hear a voice-over person
drowning out his English to give the original TV audience the German
translation), and Korean-born violinist Hyeyoon Park (a woman, but a rather
hefty one — not really stout but hardly the little slip of a thing, dressed in
Chinese-doll costume, that’s the stereotype of a young Asian female classical
musician). Physically, Gunars Upatnieks was hot; though he’s suffering from premature male-pattern
baldness, otherwise he looks like the image of a blond Aryan Nazi superman —
and Emmanuel Ceysson came across as such a nellie twink one could easily
imagine him and Upatnieks heading home for a hot night of fun after the show
was over.

Watson was a bit on the zaftig side, clearly taking after a previous Australian diva, Joan Sutherland,
both musically and physically — she sang two arias, one from Handel’s Julius
Caesar and one (Micaëla’s aria
rather than either of Carmen’s big solos) from Bizet’s Carmen — which were, ironically, the only pieces on the
program not composed during the 20th
century. Ceysson played Glière’s Concerto for Harp and Orchestra (there’ve been
surprisingly few harp concerti — the most famous harp-and-orchestra works with
at least a toehold in the repertory are brief pieces, Debussy’s Danses
Sacrée et Profane and Ravel’s Introduction
and Allegro) and the other two pieces featured were both by composers best
known for their film scores. Park’s feature was Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s
violin concerto (or at least the last two of its three movements), which not
only is from a composer best known for his film scores but is actually based
directly on themes Korngold wrote for films: Another Dawn (an almost forgotten 1937 tear-jerker with Kay
Francis and Errol Flynn) and Juárez in the first movement, Anthony Adverse (the powerful early theme that dramatized the
title character’s childhood as an orphan) in the second and The Prince and
the Pauper in the third. (Korngold
let his Warner Bros. contract expire in 1947 because he was concerned that
working for films had damaged his credibility as a “serious” classical
musician; the violin concerto was commissioned by Jascha Heifetz and was his
first work after he left Warners.)

Renes’ feature was a bass concerto in three
short movements by Nino Rota, best known for Fellini’s films and The
Godfather — and in the fast
movements there’s a bit of the raffishness of the music Rota wrote for Fellini
(I once heard an LP of Rota’s music for Fellini’s films and it was almost
unlistenable out of context, proof once again that film music doesn’t
necessarily have to be “good” in itself to work as part of its film!), while
the slow movement begins with a pizzicato jazz-style “walking bass” line (but
then the slow movement of one of Beethoven’s “Rasoumovsky” Quartets begins with
the cello playing what sounds a lot like a walking-bass line nearly 100 years
before jazz came into existence!). The Rota piece was fun — obviously nobody,
including Rota himself, was expecting any of us to take it seriously — and so
was the Glière (it’s good enough to make one wonder why there aren’t more harp
concerti; the instrument is expansive enough in range and power that it works
as well as a foil to the orchestra as the piano or violin do), but the Korngold
was the best piece of the night by a pretty wide margin and it also got the
best performance: Hyeyoon Park, dressed in a red gown that projected a
no-nonsense image, played the hell out of a rather dowdy-looking violin and
brought power and drama to the music (and given that anyone who plays the Korngold concerto is under the long
shadow of Heifetz, who premiered it in 1947 and made an incandescent recording
of it for RCA Victor six years later, her performance is all the more striking:
far more experienced and famous players have made less out of this music than
she did!), and for once conductor Renes responded to his soloist and himself
brought more sensitivity and eloquence to his phrasing than he had in his
relatively perfunctory work earlier in the evening.

The existence of this
program is a testament to the relative cultural riches on offer to European TV
and radio consumers compared to the pittances we get here — as with so much
about American vs. European capitalism, it’s largely a hangover of the noblesse
oblige of the feudal tradition
which has given Europeans the idea that the masses ought to have access to
musical and theatrical culture that will elevate them instead of broadcast
companies and private sponsors relentlessly pandering to the lowest common
denominator — and since a lot of the fun in programs like this is wondering
what will happen to the young participants as they age and their careers
develop (or don’t), as physically attractive as I found both Upatnieks and
Ceysson, it’s Park who clearly (at least to me) has the best shot at the brass
ring. It used to be fashionable to patronize women musicians by saying things
like, “She plays well … for a girl,” but Park plays well … period, and unlike a
lot of musicians today she’s not only well-trained she clearly has an attitude towards the music that should take her far, a
willingness to show us not only that she knows her way around her instrument
but that she knows how to use the music to bare her soul. (Admittedly, she was playing a
hyper-Romantic piece that invites soul-baring and it’ll be interesting to see
how she copes with more restrained composers like Bach.)